BSD Education

BSD Education provides educators a solution of software, curriculum, training and support that enables digital skills education in every classroom.

At BSD we are on a mission to reduce the digital skills divide and consequent growing inequality by empowering educators of all backgrounds with the confidence, content and capacity to teach real world relevant digital skills to students. We believe that, despite the diversity of challenges that exist, enabling teachers in public and private education systems is key.

BSD has taken an evidence based approach, Digital Promise certified, to create a solution of pedagogical online platform that runs on any browser, computer or tablet, comprehensive curriculum that maps to technology and national curricular standards and capacity building training, coaching and support certified by the CPD Standards Office delivered to educators online and in person, and scalable through a train the trainer model. BSD operates teacher events, webinars and an online community with over 100 best practice resources to grow community around the digital skills of teachers.

Working itself and with partners internationally, BSD has scaled its solution to over 4,000 educators and 66,000 students in 200 institutions globally. We have successfully piloted programs in Philippines, Thailand (Thai and English) and Indonesia with local partners to advise on localisation and implementation.

Digital skills are the gateway to future career opportunities. Studies show future jobs require the application of digital skills. Digital skills are not traditionally assessed, with capability and suitability judged more fairly by employers based on portfolio evidence. This offers a significant opportunity for students of all backgrounds in South East Asia both domestically and to build international careers.

BSD strengthens and enables the delivery of Technology and 21st Century skills in education. 

1) Educators have not had digital skills education and don't understand their professional applications. In school they were not taught digital skills so they lack experience of digital skills being taught.

2) The curriculum and content for digital skills has never been created. Available resources are not validated or certified. Educators do not have the skills or time to create the theoretical or practical content for learning.

3) Because of the lack of skill and content, few educators teach high quality real world digital skills in schools. The community of practice to inspire other educators is too small.

Future careers require digital and 21st century skills. Accurate data for developing markets is not consistently available, however this was illustrated in MGI's Skillshift report. To develop future relevant capabilities, students must be able to relate and translate their learning experiences from school.

Degrees are the traditional benchmark for job suitability. Developing markets like Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines and Vietnam have low tertiary enrolment (World bank states as low as 5% in poorest communities). Their universities are lowly ranked and don't produce graduates with competitive advantage versus international candidates. 

Digital and 21st Century Skills do no conform to traditional benchmarks and South East Asian economies are known as competitively advantageous to develop digital products and services. The potential of digital skills education at school can be seen as nothing less than economically transformative. 

In Indonesia, Thailand and Philippines, we have worked with distribution partners on the ground with strong local education roots. Initial customer engagements have begun with local (low cost) and international (high cost) private schools where the BSD solution has been able to roll out, educators to be trained and students to begin learning.

As initial market presence has been developed, we subsequently plan to engage with public schools and government groups to establish public pilot programs and seek a relevant solution that is relevant to the starting experience of all teachers and students with a view to developing a long term progression for students enabled by capacity amongst teachers delivered by the broad implementation of BSD's unique training, coaching and support methodology. 

To enable the capacity to be delivered affordably and at scale BSD operates a train the trainer model. This has been successfully implemented in Japan over an 18 month period from initial market implementations with private schools through to pilot program implementation, curriculum localisation, government approval and local trainer knowledge transfer.

It is the case, e.g. in Philippines where we have also found insufficient infrastructure to support any program implementation. In this case we were able to structure the program timetable around what was available to initiate initial educator training and then scale to student learning through the implementations of the educators at the point that internet connectivity became available.

The direct beneficiaries are the educators, but the greatest beneficiary at scale ultimately becomes the students.

We have created an end to end solution for enabling educators to teach digital and 21st Century skills to students. Whilst the BSD Education solution does require internet connectivity, where this is possible and linked to our ability to train local delivery partners we align to the social innovation in providing a solution that is affordable, can be delivered at scale and is already present in schools in Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines and Philippines.

Digital and 21st Century skills are the gateway to future career opportunity. But relevance is not compelling to a learner where opportunity can appear unobtainable.

Where Digital skills shine, within economies with low tertiary education attainment, is that students can be demonstrated an achievable and gainful career opportunity directly from school. Those that already left school, might have done so out of a lack of educational relevance to their ability to earn directly from school.

The BSD Education solution delivering capacity, affordably and in a localised form can lead to a clearly career related and gainful educative pathway through school to the workforce of the future.

The team lead for BSD Education is the CEO and Founder, Christopher Geary. 

The BSD Education approach is innovative because it has taken an unusual direction in targeting the enablement of educators. This is the most systemically impactful opportunity but also the hardest to successfully deliver because it needs to be funded with more patient capital than B2C endeavours that require less evidence of educational validation and testing to become accepted and develop momentum.

In create its solution, the BSD team has created a pedagogically focused technology platform that enables educators to begin teaching digital skills with as little as 2 hours of familiarisation.

BSD conducted extensive research to create and accessible and unyieldingly real world relevant curriculum. The BSD curriculum is uniquely able to conform to the requirements of educational standards while also relating appropriately to the nature of time in which learning takes place e.g. technology classes, traditional subject learning with an integrated approach, out of school time learning or career related study time.

BSD's solution pays a unique level of detail and human attention to the successful training, coaching and supporting of educators because we haev realised the important of developing not only the confidence and capability of the educator at the point of training, but the trust in the solution and the self esteem of being valued in a high touch supportive environment to really drive the momentum for in-classroom implementation.

We are used by 4000 educators and 66000 students in all types of institutions across 200 partners in 16 countries. We have worked with students in developing and developed countries from affluent and underserved communities as well as students from neuro-typical and neuro-atypical communities. 

Our solution has be independently assessed by Digital Promise and the CPD Standards Office.

We are government approved in Japan and also work with NTUC and NICA in Singapore. 

Our solution has been tested in schools, with non-profit partners, with educational businesses and through community based and freelance educators. Students the are taught by BSD enabled educators range from 8 - 21 years old and the BSD product has been successfully used in localised format in traditional Chinese, Thai and Japanese.

Our technology platform, BSD Online, is central to our overall educator enablement. It is a pedagogical tool that focuses on providing an educator teaching students digital skills with the real time data, student progress, answers, glossaries, communication tools, collaboration tools, evidentiary portfolios, student management tools, and access to our comprehensive curricular materials as required. The BSD Online platform has been developed through an iterative process in collaboration with educators over the last 5 years.

Educators that gain confidence can also use onboard content creation tools to add their own materials and resources to the BSD teaching materials and resources to further create the learning experience for their specific students.

Whilst it is true that the BSD Online platform does require an internet connection to function, it can work successfully on a 2mb connection, requires no download and runs in any browser.

The BSD Online platform runs on AWS cloud servers and meets international privacy and data management standards.

BSD Logic Model: https://bsd.education/wp-conte...

A core component of a lack of Digital Skills in the youth population arising from education rests in the fact that teachers have not been provided the confidence, content or capacity to deliver digital skills learning in a career relevant way to their students and that the community for this to flourish does not exist.

BSD's software platform nurtures confidence, our curriculum delivers content that can be trusted and is fully resourced ready to use, our unique approach to training, coaching and supporting educators delivers the capacity. Our webinars, events and online community nurtures communities of practice to be able to grow for the future.

We currently measure educator and student number growth, NPS, learning hours per student with our solution in schools, students that we know have used their portfolios to get jobs.

We measure educator retention and also educator implementation from professional learning transference to in classroom implementation.

Next Year:

1) Grow educator usage of our solution by introducing an offering that can be purchased by an educator directly online and then implemented with their students at their school.

2) Grow number of educators taking the BSD professional learning whether or not they will implement the full BSD solution or apply the skills developed to enhance what they are already doing.

These will be achieved by launching the new offerings that have been created with an enhanced e-payment platform for access.

3 Years:

1) Increase the number of students learning with BSD resources within the 16-18 age group.

2) Understand the next steps that are being taken by students that haver learned with BSD resources and how it impacts their decisions.

This will be achieved by continued growth in our older age group program of learning introduced in 2020. Growing student population will enable us to engage with our educator users to unearth student learner longitudinal trends.

5 Years:

Further develop the assessment and credentialing capability of the BSD platform to connect learners directly to career and further study opportunities. Measure the results to show longitudinal economic impact of the BSD solution.

Financing and Market entry are related barriers. BSD is a lean team working internationally therefore to accelerate our progress towards our impact goals we seek financing and institutional partnership, particularly in markets requiring significant growth to accelerate growth.

We have created a solution that can scale with affordability and access at its focus therefore can comfortably form partnerships to achieve goals where they are available.

BSD Education was started in 2013 as a teaching organisation recognising the critical nature of digital skills for students' future careers and a fundamental absence of real world relevant digital skills learning from education.

We began creating courses and teaching students in formal and informal educational settings. In 2015 we began offering courses in Thailand and the United States to broaden our understanding of global education markets. In 2016 teachers developed a noticeably greater interest in being able to deliver digital skills programs of learning in their school themselves and we therefore began the development of the BSD Online platform, curriculum, training, coaching and support solution that has let us enable educators around the world today.

We launched our solution in 2017, began working with channel partners in 2018 and received our product certifications in 2020 and 2021.

There is a clear disparity between the prospects of people with and without digital skills that will aggravate already endemic inequality globally. We dedicate ourselves to growing BSD because we firmly believe in the potential of digital skills as a seminal opportunity to reduce inequality around the world - solving the digital skills divide by enabling educators.

We have 27 full time team members, work with ~40 contract educators and 15 channel partners.

Our team is a mixture of entrepreneurs, educators, policy makers and technologists unified in our educational mission. 

Chris and Nickey, the BSD Founders, came from private and public educational backgrounds, with and without university respectively.

Our educational professionals come from public education, private education and government backgrounds.

Our team has been stable for a long time and working systematically together to iterate our solution for the educators that we do and aspire to work with.

Within BSD teams work within technology, education, learning experience, business development and marketing. Within these teams everyone works on clear and Agile roadmaps the evolve to the needs of educators, students and new developments within technology to produce a solution that combines innovation and a reflection of the feedback of its users.

BSD is a globally remote organisation with team members based in Hong Kong Thailand, Philippines and United States. We are close to our customers and when we recruit into BSD we hire the best person from anywhere.

Chris is our CEO and one of our Founders. He has worked on BSD since it's original idea conception. Chris has also founded 3 companies still in operation, exited one business and operates 2 non-profit organisastions.

We actively work with over 200 educational institutions globally.

We partner with education institutions, non-profit foundations and businesses to design long term scale up approaches for specific communities.

We partner with technology companies on specific skill focused curricular development

We partner with government on piloting and rolling out localised approaches with BSD's solution.

We partner with educational distributors and training partners to perpetuate our ability to deliver in local markets without sacrificing our human centred approach to supporting edcuators.

We have received grant funding from state and private foundations to implement BSD programs in international locations.

We partner with a range of organisations. Our partnerships revolve around delivering our solution at scale, developing capacity for our solution to become delivered at scale or financing the delivery of our solution, at scale, to underserved communities.

1) The funds from the Octava Social Innovation Challenge would enable us to dedicated resource to training implementation teams for the BSD product in Indonesia, Thailand and Philippines as well as engage psychometrician support for work we are doing on developing the assessment and credentialing potential of the BSD solution further.

2) We are actively seeking to connect with industry partners within South East Asian and American markets to work with us on connecting students with digital skills learned on BSD programs to career opportunity.

3) We would like to partner with Octava Foundation and MIT to gain advice on implementing stronger monitoring, evaluation and measurement of our impact.

These aspects of the partnership, amongst other areas we are sure, would enable us to accelerate the rate of our scale to enable educators as well as strengthen the way that we understand and interpret the impact that we seek to and do create. 

Our goals in partnering with the Octava Foundation and MIT Solve are to accelerate the progress that we are able to make driving our solution to underserved communities in developing markets while enhancing the way that we are able to measure and maintain positive impact as our solution's impact grows. 

Indonesia, Philippines and Thailand are some of the most severely impacted markets from the pandemic, but also markets where the non-traditional nature of digital skills careers can offer the most equal opportunity for young people. Assistance with network connections and PR assistance in a partnership will help with this growth.

Long term, we believe it is critical that our solution can not only enable educators and deliver access, but also to link them directly to and to qualify them for career opportunities. Connections to companies and industry groups across markets will help here as well as partnership on data analysis specifically related to learning data.

In expanding our work as a company with a greater percentage within developing markets, it will be critical that we are acutely aware of our impact and the quality of our solution. We would like to partner on technical support and monitoring an evaluation here.